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Watch the First Trailer for the ‘Assassin’s Creed’ Movie

Will Michael Fassbender star in the first movie based on a video game that doesn’t suck?
Image: Fox Movies.

Wednesday night, 20th Century Fox released the first trailer for the Assassin's Creed movie, which is based on Ubisoft's mammoth video game franchise of the same name.

The strangest thing about it is that, unlike every other movie based on a video game, it doesn't seem immediately horrible. It's hard to choose the worst example. You could go with the original sin of the Super Mario Bros. movie, or the Doom movie, which somehow managed to make even Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson unpleasant to watch, or the most recent Warcraft trailer, which is increasingly looking like a hot mess.

Assassin's Creed, at least based on this earliest look, seems like a movie. A weird, cheesy, sci-fi movie, but a real movie, not a straight-to-VHS production that arrived in theaters because it was based on a video game that had a built-in audience.

Part of this is because, unlike the majority of video games, Assassin's Creed the game has a high concept that could could fill a two-hour movie: science has created a way for people to experience the lives of their ancestors, and characters travel back in time to pivotal moments in history. This way, we learn what really happened during the Third Crusade, for example, and get to know the important historical characters in that story (this movie seems to be set during the Spanish Inquisition). We also learn that history was actually manipulated by two opposing factions, the Assassins and the Templars, and maybe also aliens, but whatever. It's still a pretty good yarn as far as video games go.

The other reason Assassin's Creed looks like a real movie is that it stars Michael Fassbender, a bonafide A-lister, and is directed by Justin Kurzel. Kurzel doesn't have a ton of directing credits to his name, but he and Fassbender (and Marion Cotillard, who also stars) previously collaborated on a Macbeth movie, so they have some experience working together on a passion project.

Don't get me wrong. This can still turn out to be a hot mess like every other video game movie that came before it. But the trailer doesn't look bad. Hell, it looks more interesting than the annual onslaught of Assassin's Creed video games Ubisoft has unleashed in the past few years.